What Makes Toyota So Reliable? We found Out, Plus The Best Models That’ll Go the Distance
Toyota is known for quality and reliability, but what makes it that way? Here's what we learned.
Imagine a car that actually pays you back after you buy it and drive it for years. Maybe it pays you back in resale value. Maybe it lasts over 300,000 miles. Maybe it never breaks down. Or, maybe, it does all those things.
That’s the magic of Toyota and why, over the last 40 years the company has built its cars, trucks, and SUVs in the US, it’s become one of the most-loved car brands on the road.
But what makes Toyota such a great brand?
This story is 100% human-researched and written based on actual first-person knowledge, extensive experience, and expertise on the subject of cars and trucks. Additionally, I was Toyota’s guest for this tour, but all opinions are my own.
It Starts With A Philosophy And Process For Perfection
Last week, I was part of yet another group to tour Toyota’s production facilities in Princeton, Indiana, and Georgetown, Kentucky. I say “yet another” because tours are a common thing; the assembly plants are open to the public for tours, and plenty of people sign up to tour the company’s heritage center, learn about the history, and see how their favorite cars, trucks, and SUVs are made.
Our tour, however, took us deeper into the process than the average tour: we got to really dig in and see what makes this brand tick. It starts with a process that strives for perfection at every point, allows for mistakes or missteps to be corrected, and derives new lessons from each.
From prepping parts delivered by suppliers to robotic functions that do most of the hard work to training, maintenance, and more, every part of the Toyota value of “Kaizen,” or continual improvement, is seen in all that Toyota does.
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Designed to Go The Distance
When you get into any car, the first thing you’ll notice is the things that surround you: the seats, screens, dashboard, center console, and steering wheel. Within those components are buttons, dials, toggles, and touch-sensitive controls that control the car, media, navigation, climate, and more.
Toyota’s approach is to ensure those features will last the lifetime of the car, just as much as the suspension, powertrain, and other key components.
But as cars continue to advance quickly, there is more technology at our fingertips than ever. That means there’s a lot that can go wrong.
This is an area where Toyota is a little risk-averse; the company invests in features and components that it knows can go the distance—that 300,000 miles or 20 years of ownership. So until a tech feature has demonstrated the resilience to meet that criteria, it won’t be added to the mix. That means that often, Toyota might be the last to add popular features or new engineering techniques.
Read: Designed to Go the Distance: Toyota Tundra
Innovation Is at the Heart of Toyota’s Mission
That isn’t to say that Toyota isn’t innovative; in fact, the company pushes the boundaries in areas where they passionately believe they can succeed. They were the first to develop many important innovations, including hybrid powertrains, crawl control for off-roading, and were the first to introduce Qi wireless phone charge pads in their cars.
More recently, Toyota upgraded its multimedia user experience, adding app-style functions, and was one of the first non-luxury brands to add “Hey Toyota” voice assistance throughout its lineup.
But probably the most famous innovation, and one that changed automotive fundamentally, is “the Toyota Way” of manufacturing.
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Kaizen Is the Core of The Toyota Way
Kaizen, or continuous improvement, is at the heart of Toyota’s process and the core reason its cars, trucks, and SUVs are so good.
But how does Kaizen play out in the process? And what does that really mean? Toyota developed the “Toyota Way” nearly 25 years ago to spell out how the company attains such high levels of quality through its manufacturing process. Kaizen involves preparedness, constantly checking for quality, solving problems that pop up, and addressing issues in real time rather than letting them build up.
In addition to Kaizen, The Toyota Way cites respect for people as a core value.
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Quality Is a Process, Not Simply a Value
Quality starts with checks and more checks at every stage of production and a focus on quality that involves, you guessed it, more checks.
Toyota team members are given more than 40 hours of quality training to ensure that everyone knows not only how to check for quality, but what to do when a part, a process, or an assembly isn’t up to the Toyota standard.
Each team member, who receives about $16,000 worth of training as a new hire, is asked to continually look for gaps in quality throughout the assembly process. Considering that there are more than 7,000 employees at each assembly plant constantly checking for quality, it’s fairly certain that even the smallest issues will be quickly found.
Read: The Toyota RAV4, the Most Popular SUV Maybe Ever, Just Got a Lot Better
Respect for People Is Found in … Robotics? Yup!
The Toyota Way breaks down the manufacturing process by philosophical ideas, translating them into the physical processes that take place at an assembly plant. In the years since it was written, car manufacturing plants have modernized, adding AGVs, or autonomous guided vehicles, and a ‘robotic’ assembly line that shuttles a car’s skeleton around the plant until all its parts have been added and the car is fully assembled. These are things seen on most car assembly plant floors.
The addition of robotics isn’t just about automating the process, but rather, assisting human team members, making their jobs easier, faster, and less stressful. Some team members integrate directly with the robots (these human-machine teams are called “cobots”), and others are programmed to deliver bins full of parts around the plant.
It was pretty clear to see, as we toured the plants, that the robots have reduced the time people might have spent walking across the plant floor or waiting for parts. Toyota also says the systems can adapt to people’s needs; an assembly system can adjust for a shorter team member, making the job easier and reducing physical stress.
We also saw respect as a value playing out in other ways, from the resources, such as on-site child and health care, to employee-driven innovations, to the many employees who have moved up in the ranks over the years at Toyota’s plants.
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Toyota Dojo Training and Maintenance for the Equipment
On our tour, we were taken to an outbuilding set behind a row of tall assembly plant buildings. Entering through a nondescript door, we were suddenly in the Dojo training center for maintenance. It’s the car company’s ‘shop,’ and maybe the most eye-opening part of our tour.
Dojo is the Japanese concept for a training room, where employees can learn or refine their craft. But at Toyota, the concept of Dojo is more focused on using, repairing, and troubleshooting all the equipment and tools the company uses in its nearly 1 million square feet of factory space.
At the training and maintenance center, teachers and students learn to use robots, take them apart, understand what makes them work, and how to troubleshoot problems. They also employ scale models, and even virtual reality, of large equipment so team members can learn how to use them at a smaller scale before being sent out to, say, repair a scaffolding 30 feet over the assembly plant floor.
Read: Process For Perfection Led to the Toyota Prius, the Hybrid That Started a Revolution
Training and Mentoring Are Where Kaizen and Respect Merge
The average employee at Toyota receives 26 or more hours of job training and 40 or more hours of training focused on quality. So before stepping foot into the job for a single day, they’ve trained, been mentored, and learned. Training combines all the usual suspects, from video tutorials to skill-based activities to assessments, so employees know their natural skills and those that they need to double-check (that quality check protocol, again!).
Once a new team member has completed training, they are assigned a mentor so they have someone to communicate with, to share resources with, and to help them find solutions if they need them. Toyota wants everyone to have a “soft landing” when they start a new job there.
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Investing in Toyota’s Future
When Toyota built its plant in Princeton, Indiana, in 1997, one of the biggest challenges was to staff its 7,000 team members locally.
But it became quickly apparent that Toyota needed to plant seeds to develop new generations of people who would help the company build excellent cars, trucks, and SUVs.
So in 2021, the company started a program called “Driving Possibilities” in partnership with the local school system. The program pledged millions of dollars and a partnership to help create STEM learning programs for the local schools, from pre-K to high school.
We saw in awe as pre-K four and five-year-olds sat and played games with robots and drove trikes, and played on a very “mobility” themed playground that the program built. But more impressive are the high schoolers; they are inspired to learn to plan and build their own projects in a new shop at the local high school. Students can enter the 2-year program and either intern at Toyota or apply to college; the program has raised college admissions to 60% of students in the district.
It’s the rare assembly plant that you might walk into, or schedule a tour of, that you might leave feeling like you could go there every day. But that’s the goal of Toyota’s assembly plants: to blend modern tech with human respect for some of the coolest jobs around. That they produce cars, trucks, and SUVs that can go the distance and last decades might just be a bonus.
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